Sunday, 9 August 2015

Meet Wayne Fromm Selfie stick inventor, he's now a millionaire

Selfie
sticks are, depending on who you talk to, either a useful invention well on its
way to ubiquity, or an annoying fad that needs to be stopped.

The
gadgets have been banned from places like Apple meetings and theme parks, but continue to proliferate on
street corners and in Best Buys, throughout the United States and the rest of
the world.

Someone
is making money off these things, but the question is, who?

One
person for sure is Wayne Fromm, a Canadian inventor who considers
himself the

father of the modern selfie stick. The selfie stick’s genesis is
shrouded in conflicting lore, but even Fromm admits he wasn’t the first one to
come up with an idea of a camera on a stick. That person, possibly, is Hiroshi
Ueda, a engineer for the camera company Minolta who
experimented with an early selfie design as far back as the 1980s. But
we can't be completely certain.

Original Quik Pod Selfie Stick

Fromm’s
claim to being the father of the selfie stick doesn’t rest on being first, but
being the one who envisioned the entire scope of the selfie stick. Ueda’s
selfie stick was a flop for Minolta in the 80s. “It was meant to be attached to
one particular type of camera,” Fromm tells Business Insider.

“Mine
would attach to any camera, or any cellphone.” And he wanted a selfie stick the
could not only hold anything, but could go anywhere. “The original selfie
stick was more complex than the ones you see now,” Fromm says. “It had to
survive the Arctic. I ran over it with an old Canadian tractor from 1959 with
1,000 pound tires.”

Fromm
filed what seems to be the earliest U.S. patent for a selfie stick in 2005,
after years of tinkering with things like umbrella technology. It was titled,
an “Apparatus
for supporting a camera and method for using the apparatus.” Then he
brought it to market. Fromm’s version of the selfie stick is called the Quik Pod,
and he’s been selling it in one form or another since 2006.

But
pretty soon after Fromm began producing Quik Pods, he noticed a problem.

He would
type his brand name into Alibaba, the “Chinese Amazon,” and be confronted with
a sea of knockoffs. And as the selfie craze reached a fever pitch, he began to
see them not only in China, but in places like his local Walgreens. He’s even
seen knockoffs in the U.S. with promotional photos of his own daughter slapped
on them.

In the
face of this onslaught of knockoffs, there wasn’t much that Fromm could do. The
concept, he realized, wasn’t something he could protect. In fact, even if he
could, was it really his right? He hadn’t invented the idea of a camera on a
stick — what he’d invented, was the Quik Pod.

So Fromm
doubled down on quality and the high end market. His designs were originally
meant to hold up to 28 pounds of DSLR camera, and not shake if you jumped out
of an airplane with it. He marketed to GoPro, to the emerging product class of
“action cameras.” And it worked.

Fromm has
sold over a million units of his Quik Pods to date.

“My sales
have been strong in that industry for a long time,” Fromm says. We are in Best
Buy and Target. We are in 42 countries.”

And what
about the knockoffs? “They’ve overproduced in north China,” Fromm says. “I have
my sources. Buyers for the major chains, they don’t want this. They’ll carry
them, but it’s not a money maker for anybody.”